[vox-tech] familiar review

[Gabriel Rosa <grosMAPSa@ucdavis.edu>]

hey all,

so I got my ipaq 2 days ago (a gift from Marianne) and after a night of
not sleeping, and a day of being extremely impressed with Familiar 0.5.1, I
thought I'd share a bit.

First of all, getting Familiar installed on the Ipaq was a piece of cake.
I followed the instructions on the familiar website:

first (under "PocketPC") I set the Ipaq up for "dialup", ie. ppp to my
desktop over serial. Then using PocketExplorer I downloaded BootBlaster
and a free FTP client called ScottyFTP, and backed up my boot sector and
wince partition, then transfered those over to the desktop.

Then I downloaded the bootldr and flashed the boot sector using bootblaster.
Reboot time. Hold down the d-pad and hit the reset switch, and up came
a nice Tux image and a bootloader picture.

Since the Ipaq was still in the cradle I opened up minicom, and set up a
serial connection to it, and was greeted by the boot loader command line.

Wipe the wince partition, and type 'load root' to load the root image I had
downloaded from the familiar page, and then used minicom to upload the image
with xmodem. It wrote the image to flash and then I typed 'boot', and it
booted the image.

An X stippled pattern came up on the ipaq after boot messages on the serial
console, and a login prompt on serial.

So I logged in, and started ppp, then closed minicom, and started up ppp on
the desktop. After that, I was able to ssh into the ipaq! :)